Games

Saturday, January 14, 2012

qubodup of freegamer asked me about my graphics guy, so I thought I'd share a bit of that history and use that as an excuse for not being productive ;)

As the intro should show (the third credit), ViperMD did a great deal of graphics work on 0.9.9 release of wizznic, I met VMD at a LAN around 2000 and I consider him to be one of my close friends. He has a talent for computer graphics, both in 2D and 3D, and is an avid gamer. I have spend fair amounts of time hacking on wizznic on his couch, for whatever reason, we never talked about working on the project together.. So for the 0.9.9 release I suggested that we collaborate, admitting my shortcomings as an artist :) VMD did the Thor theme, which is going to be the default Wizznic theme, however, if I can convince him, Thor is not the last eyecandy you will be seeing from VMD, he have also shown interest in Wizznic3D, so expect some sweet graphics there ;)

VMD did 95%o of the work on Thor, with some (annoying, I'm certain) comments and input from me, Thor is his very first contribution to computer-games, and even without taking the technical limitations and my confusing and lacking leadership into account, it is a sweet piece of work if I have to say (which, obviously, I do, so I did).

We also worked together on condensing the ~80 existing levels down to 40 levels, which were divided into two packs. I hope this process increased the overall quality of the puzzles, but only time can tell. Of course I plan to add more levels in the future (New packs, and only slight adjustments/reordering of the existing ones).

The process of sorting the puzzles was interesting.. None of us had any real idea of how difficult individual puzzles were, so we did the following:

Rendered a screenshot of each level, and put those on a network share.

We now had 80 screenshots, but I wanted to mature the quality of the puzzles, and decided to only include 40 puzzles, divided into 2 packs of 20. So our first task was easy, we made a "Delete me" directory, and were allowed to choose the 20 levels that we thought looked "ugly" and delete them.

Now, remaining was 40 unsorted puzzles (with screenshots).

We created two directories there, "Easy" and "Hard", for "Pack 0" and "Pack 1".

We then inspected the level files visually to try to identify their difficulty, and then move their files into either one, this meant we could both work on the same task at the same time.

Once we had 2 dirs with 20 files in each, we made 4 subdirs in both of them,

we then worked on each our dir, and tried to identify the easist, medium-easy, medium-hard and hardest puzzles, and put them in their directories, this process was easier since it was now only 20 files to be sorted.

Finally, 20 directories were made inside both "easy" and "hard", the idea here was to go through the 4 subdirs, having the first "map" logically to "1,2,3,4" and the second to "5,6,7,8" and so on, this way, we would only have to worry about sorting a chunk of 4 levels at a time, which is a lot easier than to inspect 20 levels as a whole.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry, I haven't found a nice way of explaining it yet, which lead to some misunderstandings, but in the end it was a pretty easy task, and a method for sorting puzzles that I will be using again in the future, hopefully combined with the statistics I gather (from people who chose tho help me by enabling stats-upload in wizznic).

Deadline for Wizznic 1.0-rc is 29'th of January this year. That means I've got 4 weekends to work on it (I don't have much time during the week, and easily run out of steam..).Todo for 1.0:Updating all files to the new level format.Optional "Unsolvable", "Out of Time" and "Reset level?" graphics (and make those for Thor).One more theme (if VMD feels up for it), sound theme for Thor.

Once these features are completed, 1.0 is released, it's done.Newer versions only be bugfixes and new content.

By the way, my 3D engine that I'll use for Wizznic3D. VMD modelled and textured the spaceship.

qubodup of freegamer asked me about my graphics guy, so I thought I'd share a bit of that history and use that as an excuse for not being productive ;)

As the intro should show (the third credit), ViperMD did a great deal of graphics work on 0.9.9 release of wizznic, I met VMD at a LAN around 2000 and I consider him to be one of my close friends. He has a talent for computer graphics, both in 2D and 3D, and is an avid gamer. I have spend fair amounts of time hacking on wizznic on his couch, for whatever reason, we never talked about working on the project together.. So for the 0.9.9 release I suggested that we collaborate, admitting my shortcomings as an artist :) VMD did the Thor theme, which is going to be the default Wizznic theme, however, if I can convince him, Thor is not the last eyecandy you will be seeing from VMD, he have also shown interest in Wizznic3D, so expect some sweet graphics there ;)

VMD did 95%o of the work on Thor, with some (annoying, I'm certain) comments and input from me, Thor is his very first contribution to computer-games, and even without taking the technical limitations and my confusing and lacking leadership into account, it is a sweet piece of work if I have to say (which, obviously, I do, so I did).

We also worked together on condensing the ~80 existing levels down to 40 levels, which were divided into two packs. I hope this process increased the overall quality of the puzzles, but only time can tell. Of course I plan to add more levels in the future (New packs, and only slight adjustments/reordering of the existing ones).

The process of sorting the puzzles was interesting.. None of us had any real idea of how difficult individual puzzles were, so we did the following:

Rendered a screenshot of each level, and put those on a network share.

We now had 80 screenshots, but I wanted to mature the quality of the puzzles, and decided to only include 40 puzzles, divided into 2 packs of 20. So our first task was easy, we made a "Delete me" directory, and were allowed to choose the 20 levels that we thought looked "ugly" and delete them.

Now, remaining was 40 unsorted puzzles (with screenshots).

We created two directories there, "Easy" and "Hard", for "Pack 0" and "Pack 1".

We then inspected the level files visually to try to identify their difficulty, and then move their files into either one, this meant we could both work on the same task at the same time.

Once we had 2 dirs with 20 files in each, we made 4 subdirs in both of them,

we then worked on each our dir, and tried to identify the easist, medium-easy, medium-hard and hardest puzzles, and put them in their directories, this process was easier since it was now only 20 files to be sorted.

Finally, 20 directories were made inside both "easy" and "hard", the idea here was to go through the 4 subdirs, having the first "map" logically to "1,2,3,4" and the second to "5,6,7,8" and so on, this way, we would only have to worry about sorting a chunk of 4 levels at a time, which is a lot easier than to inspect 20 levels as a whole.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry, I haven't found a nice way of explaining it yet, which lead to some misunderstandings, but in the end it was a pretty easy task, and a method for sorting puzzles that I will be using again in the future, hopefully combined with the statistics I gather (from people who chose tho help me by enabling stats-upload in wizznic).

Deadline for Wizznic 1.0-rc is 29'th of January this year. That means I've got 4 weekends to work on it (I don't have much time during the week, and easily run out of steam..).Todo for 1.0:Updating all files to the new level format.Optional "Unsolvable", "Out of Time" and "Reset level?" graphics (and make those for Thor).One more theme (if VMD feels up for it), sound theme for Thor.

Once these features are completed, 1.0 is released, it's done.Newer versions only be bugfixes and new content.

By the way, my 3D engine that I'll use for Wizznic3D. VMD modelled and textured the spaceship.